In the early 1970s Ira Levin's creepy The Stepford Wives, about a Connecticut town where all the wives have been replaced by computerized models, was a gothic tale that hit the bestseller lists as a sort of chilling response to the feminist movement.
The spooky 1975 screen version played it for chills as Katharine Ross, as the new woman in town, wondered why all the women were so subservient to their husbands and she began digging up horrible secrets about the place.
Like it or not, more than a quarter century later the feminist movement has more or less shifted our feelings about the roles of men and women and so Frank Oz's wacky new version of The Stepford Wives plays the story mostly for outlandish laughs.
Oz, and writer Paul Rudnick, have made everything so much larger than life that The Stepford Wives, while often very funny and pointedly ironic, gets caught up in its over-the-topness. It's not enough to show that celebrated writer Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler) is a sloppy housewife with a few things tossed casually around her living room; the place is turned into something that looks as though a tornado had just raced through. It's not enough to show that Joanna Eberhart (Nicole Kidman), the new woman in town, has decided to demonstrate she can be the perfect Stepford wife by baking a batch of cupcakes; she turns out hundreds and hundreds of them.
Trapped by the movie's zaniness, the few creepy moments in The Stepford Wives seem out of place. Worse, as it flits between comedy and terror, the film has no place to go now. Its logical conclusion has been expanded with an epilogue. The film's final reel has a tacked-on feel, a sop to give this waspily barbed tale a happy Hollywood ending. But though certainly bizarre and wildly amusing, it seems a desperate attempt that changes the focus of one character who performs acts that seem to come from nowhere. From laughing with the actors, who seem to be having a mostly merry time of it, suddenly we begin laughing at them and the outrageous foolishness of the filmmakers.
Kidman's Joanna, once the "hardest working person in television," arrives in Stepford Estates, a gated community in Connecticut, to recover from a disastrous fall from grace at her network. Her husband, Walter (Matthew Broderick), hopes the quiet of this quaint town with its enormous houses, will do her good.
But they quickly discover that Stepford is not like any other place in America. The wives, all glossily pretty and extraordinarily well endowed, wear low-cut dresses with full skirts and high heels, even to aerobics class. They seem airheads, doing their husbands' bidding like good-girl servants.
The husbands, nerdy to a fault, spend most of their spare time hanging out at the forbidding, castle-like Stepford Men's Association. There they smoke cigars, play boyish games with remote-controlled toy vehicles and do secret things with the shades drawn at night. Their dealings are presided over by the ultra-smooth Mike Wellington and all you need to know about his sinister side is that he's played by Christopher Walken at his most unctuous.
Much of The Stepford Wives is played definitely tongue in cheek, the actors gleefully waiting to spring their witty lines and oddball situations on us. Prime among them is Glenn Close, channeling a glimmering vision of Cruella De Vil as Claire Wellington, a woman who seems most happy to be in Stepford. Close's Claire is sort of a Stepford cheerleader who leads the aerobics class, sets up a town square dance and seems to have her finger in every pie. Only Connecticut-born Close could turn the word "Connecticut" into the film's funniest punchline.
On the other hand, Midler overplays her role, although she has hilariously sarcastic moments when she and Joanna join the Stepford Wives Book Club and discover the book of the week is about Christmas crafts.
Roger Bart overreaches, too, as a stereotypical homosexual who, with Midler's Bobbie, joins Joanna on a nighttime prowl looking for the secrets harbored inside the walls of the men's association. It's here that we also discover that The Stepford Wives doesn't believe in its own convictions. Although we're told that the wives are merely implanted with computer chips to make them subservient, on two occasions we're led to believe that new robot bodies have been created to replace their human counterparts. The Stepford Wives seems to want to have it both ways.
Kidman has the creepiest moments, as Joanna tries to fathom what's going on in Stepford. Mild-mannered Broderick seems too much a pushover to resist the proddings of the other men. When Broderick's Walter must change course in the film, it seems out of character.
Although there are lots of entertaining moments in The Stepford Wives, there are too many times when the filmmakers don't seem to know what kind of movie they wanted to make.
**1/2
The Stepford Wives
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, Roger Bart, Faith Hill, Glenn Close, David Marshall Grant, Jon Lovitz.
Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes.
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